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Daley dome envy, migration, High Line boom

* A few years after knocking down Soldier Field to build the new Bears stadium (one of the smallest in the NFL), Daley has suggested “getting a new NFL team”:http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=18914 — not because they’d win more than the division-leading Bears, but because he wants an Olympic dome. Uhm, okay, so why didn’t he support LPCI’s plan to leave well enough alone at Soldier Field and build a new dome in Bridgeport, next to the Sox stadium? As Roger Ebert pointed out in the Sun-Times lately, _Detroit_ got the Super Bowl this year because they have a dome. Meanwhile, a dome in Bridgeport would solidify opportunities to build more sports-related entertainment venues there, give more weeks of life to the often-empty Sox parking garages, and provide the city with a new indoor venue with better transportation than the lakefront.

* An interesting, if dated, table found in a 1999 paper by Dowell Myers entitled “Demographic Dynamism and Metropolitan Change” shows that, among other things, NYC is really no more of a national draw than Chicago, and that Blacks in large metros actually have higher mobility rates than Whites. Wouldn’t be hard to get Census 2000 numbers; some numbers I’ve seen for LA have shown that Asian and Latino immigration has slowed, and a new generation of second(+) generation immigrants has matured. (Left out a line about migrants from US territories, i.e., Puerto Rico, and numbers for DC.)

* Claire Wilson in the “Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/realestate/18cover.html reports on how developers have swooped down upon the High Line, proposing 13 towers with 5,500 apartments, media offices, star-chef restaurants, new gallery spaces, and a Standard Hotel. Assuming an average of $1M per apartment (modest even after accounting for a 20% inclusionary set-aside), just the residential development spurred by the $130M High Line project would be worth $5.5 billion!

“Developers balked — and some who wanted it torn down threatened to sue — when Friends of the High Line was formed in 1999 and proposed the idea of turning the railroad bed into an elevated park. Six years later, the corridor is like catnip to the same developers, with more than a dozen projects planned and countless others being considered.”